UK 'must redesign' e-gov sites

Accessibilty is key or perhaps miss out.

[ukgimp]

You may wonder what this one is doing in this forum. Well I could argue that it is professional business issue. If you don’t cater for the large amount of people who have disabilities when it comes to securing a contract you may struggle.

I can hear the question being posed now by a nervous CEO who has seen the changes in the law:

“Is it accessible?”

Don’t get me wrong I am not talking Jakob style, but there is lot of shortcomings in the vast majority of websites. Shortcomings that could easily be put right. Clearly some levels of accessibility are harder than other and would alter the “corporate look” of the website.

Recent Register Article:

[theregister.co.uk...]

[Marketing Guy]

Interestingly I first started designing my sites with pure accessibility in mind.

I was working for a disability information charity at the time and the IT Manager was showing me the ropes with web design, search engine submissions and accessibility.

About a year later I set up my own site.

3 months down the line (as I started SEO and was introduced to WW), some professional SEO's commented to me that my site was well SEO'd.

Now I hadn't done any SEO worked to the site, but I was getting top ten rankings on the big G.

The point is that an accessible site is as good for search engines as it is your users.

Think about - Google are encouraging good web design with their algo - good navigation, outbound and inbound links, etc. It makes sense that an accessible site would do well.

Scott